Citizen engineers are throwing their warranties to the wind, hacking their
TiVos, Xboxes, and home networks. Wily geeks are jacking Jetsons-like technology
into their cars for music, movies, geolocation, and internet connectivity
on the road. E-commerce and network service giants like Amazon, eBay, PayPal,
and Google are decoupling, opening, and syndicating their services, then realizing
and sharing the network effects. Professional musicians and weekend DJs are
serving up custom mixes on the dance floor. Operating system and software
application makers are tearing down the arbitrary walls they've built, turning
the monolithic PC into a box of loosely coupled component parts and services.
The massive IT infrastructure of the '90s is giving way to what analyst Doc
Searls calls "do-it-yourself IT."

We see all of this as a reflection of the same trend: the mass amateurization
of technology, or, as Fast Company put it, "the amateur revolution."
And it's these hacks, tweaks, re-combinations, and shaping of the future we're
exploring in this year's Emerging Technology Conference theme: Remix.

In this opening session, your conference host introduces you to the gestalt
of ETech and how the subject matter of past years has woven itself into the
fabric of ETech today.

Then Dornfest looks ahead to how the remix culture will impact business
and technological innovation, product and service development and adoption,
the Internet ecology, and change the way ordinary people interact with ever
more tech in their midst.